Author: Maria Popova / Source: Brain Pickings
What is genius — what is its nature and its proof? For Beethoven, genius was based on a foundation of talent, but required additional “freshness and wildness of imagination, a raging ambition, an unusual gift for learning and growing, a depth and breadth of thought and spirit. ” “Genius gives birth, talent delivers,” Kerouac proclaimed in weighing whether great artists are born or made. “Talent is insignificant. I know a lot of talented ruins,” Baldwin cautioned aspiring writers as he considered the real building blocks of genius. Schopenhauer furnished what remains the finest metaphor for the difference between genius and talent. Thoreau drew a vital distinction between an artisan, an artist, and a genius. And yet genius — that singular creative force capable of bowling us over with truth and beauty, leaving us transformed and enlarged — continues to fascinate and puzzle with its elusive essence.
This eternal question of what genius actually is and how we measure it — one of the major themes in Figuring — is what the Romantic poet laureate of human consciousness, William Wordsworth (April 7, 1770–April 23, 1850), examines in a prefatory essay from the 1815 edition of the two-volume set Poems by William Wordsworth (public library | free ebook).
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